be you.

Coalition condemns ongoing murders of members of the LGBT community in Puerto Rico

September 16, 2010

New York City Stands in Solidarity with the Puerto Rican Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community, a coalition of LGBT groups and elected officials, is outraged by an ongoing series of murders of members of the LGBT community in Puerto Rico. This week, two transgender women were found dead alongside Highway 512 in Juana Díaz. Both women had been shot in the head. Also, a local political leader in Aguada was beaten to death. The two male suspects who confessed to this crime alleged that they killed him because he solicited them for “sexual favors.”

Pedro Julio Serrano, communications manager of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, founder of the LGBT rights group Puerto Rico Para Tod@s and a founding member of the coalition, says the law requires authorities in Puerto Rico to investigate whether the murders were motivated by the victims’ sexual orientation or gender identity and urges them to respond adequately to this wave of violence.

It’s amazing what people can do to other people just because he or she appears to be different from what a person might understand by convention. The dragging to death of a gay person in Wyoming to killing of two transgendered people in Puerto Rico is completely wrong and immoral in the contemporary American thought. Freedom is never free in the sense that all gay people who have died at hands of such bigotry have paid the price for more tolerance and acceptance into the American psyche.